Planning the Built Environment takes a systematic, technical approach to describing how urban infrastructures work. Accompanied by detailed diagrams, illustrations, tables, and reference lists, the book begins with landforms and progresses to essential utilities that manage drainage, wastewater, power, and water supply. A section on streets, highways, and transit systems is highly detailed and practical. Once firmly grounded in these "macro" systems, Planning the Built Environment examines the physical environments of cities and suburbs, including a discussion of critical elements such as street and subdivision planning, density, and siting of community facilities. Each chapter includes essential definitions, illustrations and diagrams, and an annotated list of references. This timely book explains new physical planning methods and current thinking on cluster development, new urbanism, and innovative transit planning and development. Planners, architects, engineers, and anyone who designs or manages the physical components of urban areas will find this book both an authoritative reference and an exhaustive, understandable technical manual of facts and best practices. Instructors in planning and allied fields will appreciate the practical exercises that conclude each chapter: valuable learning tools for students and professionals alike.

This book takes a sweeping view of the ways we build things, beginning at the scale of products and interiors, to that of regions and global systems. In doing so, it answers questions on how we effect and are affected by our environment and explores how components of what we make—from products, buildings, and cities—are interrelated, and why designers and planners must consider these connections.

This engaging and practical guide is a much-needed new textbook that illustrates the power of geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial analysis. Today's planner has a wealth of data available to them, much of which is increasingly linked to a specific location. From football clubs to Twitter conversations, government spending to the spread of diseases – data can be mapped. Once mapped, the data begins to tell stories, patterns are revealed, and effective planning decisions can be made. When used effectively, GIS allows students, planners, residents and policymakers to solve wicked problems in the environment, society and the economy. Geospatial data is now more freely available than it ever has been, as is much of the necessary software to analyse it. This contemporary text offers a practical guide to spatial analysis and what it can show us. In addition to explaining what GIS is and why it is such a powerful tool, the authors cover such topics as geovisualization, mapping principles, network analysis and decision making. Offering more than just theoretical or technical principles and concepts, the book applies GIS techniques to the real world, draws on global examples and provides practical advice on mapping the built environment. This accessible text is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking planning modules on GIS, data analysis and mapping, as well as for all planners, urbanists and geographers with an interest in how GIS can help us better understand the built environment from a socio-economic perspective.

New Urbanism and American Planning presents the history of American planners’ quest for good cities and shows how New Urbanism is a culmination of ideas that have been evolving since the nineteenth century. In her survey of the last hundred or so years of urbanist ideals, Emily Talen identifies four approaches to city-making, which she terms ‘cultures’: incrementalism, plan-making, planned communities, and regionalism. She shows how these cultures connect, overlap, and conflict and how most of the ideas about building better settlements are recurrent. In the first part of the book Talen sets her theoretical framework and in the second part provides detailed analysis of her four ‘cultures’.She concludes with an assessment of the successes and failures of the four cultures and the need to integrate these ideas as a means to promoting good urbanism in America.

Built environments are complex, emergent, systemic, and require contextual analysis. They should be understood before reconsidering how professionals and researchers of the built environment are educated and trained to reduce the gap between knowledge, practice and real-world circumstances. There is an urgent need to rethink the role of policy makers, researchers, practitioners and laypeople in the construction, renovation and reuse of the built environment in order to deal with numerous environmental/ecological, economic/financial and social/ethical challenges of providing a habitat for current and future generations in a world of continual change. These challenges are too complex to be dealt with only by one discipline or profession. Combinations of different types of knowledge, knowing in praxis and tacit knowledge are needed. This book presents and illustrates recent innovative contributions with case studies focusing on five strategic domains and the interrelations between them. These transdisciplinary contributions apply concepts, methods and tools that facilitate convergence and concerted action between participants collaborating in policy definition and project implementation. The methods and tools include experiments in living-labs, prototypes on site and virtual simulations, as well as participatory approaches including citizen science, the development of alternative scenarios, and visioning plausible futures.

This book is a comprehensive document visualizing the future of built environment from a multidisciplinary dimension, with special emphasis on the Indian scenario. The multidisciplinary focus would be helpful for the readers to cross-refer and understand others' perspectives. The text also includes case studies substantiating theoretical research. This method of composition helps the book to maintain rational balance among theory, research and its contextual application. The book comprises selected papers from the National Conference on Sustainable Built Environment. The chapters provide varied viewpoints on the core issues of urbanization and planning. This compilation would be of interest to students, researchers, professionals and policy makers.

This work aims to provide a possible specification of the problems involved in greening the built environment and an articulation of the solutions. It begins with a discussion of sustainability as a concept and its applicability to contemporary towns and cities. The following chapters take up particular aspects of the built environment and sustainability in greater depth and include the construction industry, transport, health, planning, community and equity issues, employment and the economy. The links between environmental damage, poverty and the economy are all themes in this book which also focuses on interconnections and on solutions to these three problems. The final chapter explains how the achievement of sustainable development is, in the authors' opinion, dependent on detailed solutions to everyday problems of modern society.